A national frenzy, fanned by lobbyists and the media, thwarted the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum's attempt to mount an exhibition featuring the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Martin Harwit, the director of the museum at the time, recounts the decade-long effort to restore the Enola Gay, the largest restoration project ever undertaken by the museum; recalls the help and support initially provided by General Tibbets and a small band of men he had commanded on the atomic missions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki; shows how a handful of World War II veterans became disillusioned and began to oppose the museum's display of the aircraft; and describes how these men succeeded in calling on powerful veterans' organizations, aerospace lobbyists and congressmen for help in their cause. All the while, a separate drama was unfolding in Japan, where the prospects of an exhibition of the Enola Gay, in a national museum in the heart of Washington, raised an entirely different set of concerns.

A national frenzy, fanned by lobbyists and the media, thwarted the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum's attempt to mount an exhibition featuring the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Martin Harwit, the director of the museum at the time, recounts the decade-long effort to restore the Enola Gay, the largest restoration project ever undertaken by the museum; recalls the help and support initially provided by General Tibbets and a small band of men he had commanded on the atomic missions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki; shows how a handful of World War II veterans became disillusioned and began to oppose the museum's display of the aircraft; and describes how these men succeeded in calling on powerful veterans' organizations, aerospace lobbyists and congressmen for help in their cause. All the while, a separate drama was unfolding in Japan, where the prospects of an exhibition of the Enola Gay, in a national museum in the heart of Washington, raised an entirely different set of concerns.